Hardware RAID with UFS or ZFS?

[Lurch]

Now then, going on the title alone the simple answer is ZFS every time. However, I am upgrading/migrating from various random file sharing and backup practices and I have an issue with hardware. I have at my disposal:

Intel D915GEV board with 3.4GHz P4HT
2GB (4x512MB) Kingston RAM
2x AMCC 9500S-4LP SATA RAID cards
6x 1TB WD10EFRX Red drives

I want to create 2 RAID5 arrays with 3x1TB drives each. Ideally I would like to just add all of these drives as JBOD to the system and then assign them as ZFS pools in FreeNAS, as recommended. Is this possible with the current RAID card choice, I can't seem to find much info on using these cards specifically with FreeNAS, but they do appear in the FreeBSD HCL.

Using the current hardware setup (even if I max out the memory at 4GB) this appears to not be recommended.So it looks like UFS and hardware RAID is the way to go, but I would like to be upgrading the server hardware at some point to enable me to use ZFS so it would be less hassle in the future if I could use ZFS now and then just migrate the pools to the new server then.

So I suppose really the actual question is, bearing in mind there will be 1 to 2 users accessing the drives, maybe a 3rd person once a week, but mainly none or 1, will using ZFS with 2 (or 4GB) of memory be completely unusable or unreliable? Would it be better or worse than hardware RAID5 with the AMCC cards?

 

[Lurch]

So to answer my own question, I think, for the use this NAS will have I it will perform admirably with 4GB RAM. I will keep an eye out for a new motherboard/CPU/memory though.

I suppose that means this is really just a simple question of can I use the 2 AMCC 9500S-4LP cards with Freenas 9.1 to create 2 RAIDZ1 volumes?

 

[cyberjock]

So you want validation. Well, the manual should have given you that validation. It didn't, and for good reason. If you choose to use less than 8GB of RAM you shouldn't expect record performance. AND, you can expect that the server may kernel panic at any time. There are plenty of "examples" in the forum of people that used insufficient RAM, has 1 crash and lost their entire pool.

So, if you want to go with ZFS, go for it. Just don't expect any sympathy if things go horribly wrong, you have no backup, and your wife will leave you if you don't get the wedding pictures back. You'll be told that the manual says what you need and if you didn't want to spend the money to heed the warning you simply went to the casino, gambled, and lost a hand.

 

[Lurch]

I wasn't asking for validation as such, but as a NAS with 3 users I was asking if the 4GB RAM will just be a performance issue or will it be detrimental to system stability. There will be regular backups (to 2 locations with rsysnc and also maybe local optical incremental daily), not that this means I should build an unstable local NAS, which is why I was asking. I haven't used FreeNAS since 0.7, or before even, so I wasn't expecting to need such a heavyweight set of resources, I'm obviously a bit behind the times. Until I have something working I don't want to start throwing money at a FreeNAS solution when we could have just used an off the shelf Synology NAS box to some RAID1 and rsync. I'm sorry to have offended you with my questions.

Also I have the drive controller cards showing up in FreeNAS and they are set for direct access so everything seems to be fine with those.

 

[gpsguy]

Take a look at NAS4Free, it's the successor to FreeNAS 0.7. It's RAM requirements are much lower than FreeNAS, it will run with 512Mb.

I haven't used FreeNAS since 0.7, or before even, so I wasn't expecting to need such a heavyweight set of resources

 

[Lurch]

Take a look at NAS4Free, it's the successor to FreeNAS 0.7. It's RAM requirements are much lower than FreeNAS, it will run with 512Mb.

Hmm, I will probably give it a bit of a test install. One thing that confuses me there though is that FreeNAS says that it's the ZFS system that needs the 8GB RAM but NAS4Free says that you can use ZFS with 1GB. Now I would still max out my RAM whichever version I used but does this not infer that the FreeNAS implementation of ZFS is some sort of resource hog or is just that they are intended for different audiences or something else?

I'm not just trying to be tight with the budget, I just need to justify buying new hardware for FreeNAS when on the face of it, NAS4Free will work on the kit I have.

 

[gpsguy]

Read jgreco's reply in this thread "Why does Freenas 8 have excessive hardware requirements?"

 

[Lurch]

Yep, makes sense, it's what I assumed the answer would be (roughly). As I say, a lot has changed since I last looked at building a NAS, RAID5 is now garbage, UFS is old hat, old hardware is now not a great proposition etc....

Bear in mind though that this setup is to replace a 15 year old Buffalo Linkstation with 1 250GB IDE drive, no RAID, no mirrors, and the backup is an occasional copy to somewhere else via USB.